Increasingly, I despair of my profession, and the pitifully lowbrow economic debate during the UK election campaign did not help. No wonder economists and economic policymakers are often so reviled.

Look at the map: economists should concentrate on the large areas that are understood and agreed (Getty Images)

Pointless divisions about economic policy are not a luxury the world can afford. The eight years since the global financial crisis should have been more than long enough to assure recovery, yet in many respects the economy is still staggering under the burdens created by the crisis.

In the UK, the Conservatives have just won re-election partly by claiming economic success, but are far short of crucial targets they set when they entered coalition five years ago. Meanwhile, Europe and China remain deeply troubled and the latest US growth figures inspired anxiety rather than confidence.

Yet we know more about the answers to these problems than many economists seem willing to agree.

It is not as if economists are always incapable of consensus. Right up to the global financial crisis, the conventional wisdom was that central banks were omnipotent, the business cycle had largely been tamed, and such a cataclysmic event was nigh on impossible. Coming out of the crisis, the majority view was that monetary policy was still the most powerful policy tool with which to manage the economy, fiscal consolidation was an overwhelming priority and would be relatively painless and, as long as governments were not too heavy-handed in their interventions, the “confidence fairy” would ensure a rapid recovery.

All this proved to be wishful thinking. Yet no new consensus has emerged. Indeed, economists are hopelessly divided: demand-siders versus supply-siders; expansionists versus “austerians” and free-and-efficient market fundamentalists versus those with a deep distrust of the price mechanism.

Anything approaching an optimal policy mix has been lost in the associated fog of claim and counter-claim, and all the intellectual bitchiness that goes with it.

Economics is not a pure science. Nor is it a branch of moral philosophy, or higher mathematics. It cannot be distilled into a series of enduring laws and equations. It does not lend itself to repeated controlled experiments. Rather, it is a practical and dynamic discipline, inseparable from a real world of human emotions, unstable preferences, differing cultures, satisficers rather than maximisers, and imperfect information.

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This, of course, leaves room for the interpretation of events and for politics to influence judgment.

Yet if we review the crisis and its aftermath, certain verities reveal themselves. Admittedly, some of them are frustratingly imprecise. But surely they offer a better way forward than the unrelenting trench warfare that characterises so much of the contemporary economic debate? It’s about time economists and policymakers set aside the myopia and the preaching and got real. For all our sakes.

Here are my 10 practical principles of economic engagement that the new UK government could do worse than heed:

1. Uncertainty, as opposed to measurable risk, is a fact of life, and can dominate all other considerations in decision-making. By damping animal spirits, uncertainty can constrain spending and undermine aggregate demand. As a result, economies do not necessarily rapidly self-correct, smoothly returning to equilibrium. They can get stuck far from full resource utilisation for a long time.

2. Periods of relative macroeconomic and financial tranquillity tend to embody the seeds of their own destruction, and booms and busts, asset market excesses and deep recessions are difficult, if not impossible, to avoid. Furthermore, the most intractable downturns tend to be those that follow large financial crises. The business cycle cannot therefore be entirely tamed.

3. On the other hand, neither should the business cycle be left to its own devices, because its most extreme effects can be disastrous for social and political stability. In this context, the danger with putting too much faith in the supposedly magical properties of “creative destruction” is that it delivers a very low ratio of creation to destruction.

4. There is an undeniable role for macro policy activism, especially in the wake of financial crises. That said, monetary policy is not always as potent as policymakers would like it to be. It can become overloaded. It works poorly when interest rates hit zero, when there is balance sheet adjustment across the private sector, or when uncertainty about the future is high. Hence, notwithstanding the difficulties of co-ordination within and across countries, activism should extend beyond the remit of central banks to fiscal and macro-prudential policy, and pay greater attention to macro imbalances.

5. Automatic fiscal stabilisers can and should play a key role in managing normal business cycles. In contrast, discretionary fiscal stimulus is more suited to deep and extended downturns. Sadly, across the developed world, fiscal policy was almost universally compromised by 50 years of over-optimism about its effects and short-sighted, politically driven, budgetary excess. When interest rates get close to zero, however, the financial constraints on its employment abate.

6. Fiscal consolidation is impossible to achieve when most of your trading partners are doing it simultaneously and/or when the private sector is deleveraging. Furthermore, “expansionary fiscal contractions” are rare. They happen only in the most propitious of circumstances.

7. Sovereign debt crises are usually the result of private sector credit booms turned to bust. Greece and Portugal aside, the latest crisis had little to do with public sector profligacy per se, even if historically high levels of government debt subsequently complicated the fiscal policy response to it. Overcoming a sovereign debt crisis requires sustained economic growth and probably a dose of debt restructuring. It cannot be cured by fiscal austerity alone.

8. Demand management is insufficient. To maximise economic performance, governments must persistently pursue structural policies that encourage the flow of resources from declining and less productive activities to more productive activities, and leave economies better equipped to absorb shocks: in short, initiatives that increase economies’ capacity to adapt to change. This means appropriate strategies to foster competition, education and training, research and development, entrepreneurship, sound infrastructure, trade, foreign direct investment, and flexible labour markets.

9. Too often, policymakers have ended up continuing to fight the last battle long after it has been won and some new challenge was emerging. And the next crisis is usually very different.

10. Policymakers, like everyone else, have struggled to differentiate the cyclical from the structural. Whatever the immediate evidence to the contrary, major shifts in underlying macroeconomic performance are rare. Influences come and go, but economies are often prisoners of long-term considerations such as demographics, if not of their own history, culture, institutions and politics. To exert an enduring, transformational, impact on these considerations, policy changes have to be substantial and persistent in nature.